TY - JOUR T1 - Detection of human adaptation during the past 2,000 years JF - bioRxiv DO - 10.1101/052084 SP - 052084 AU - Yair Field AU - Evan A Boyle AU - Natalie Telis AU - Ziyue Gao AU - Kyle J. Gaulton AU - David Golan AU - Loic Yengo AU - Ghislain Rocheleau AU - Philippe Froguel AU - Mark I. McCarthy AU - Jonathan K. Pritchard Y1 - 2016/01/01 UR - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2016/05/07/052084.abstract N2 - Detection of recent natural selection is a challenging problem in population genetics, as standard methods generally integrate over long timescales. Here we introduce the Singleton Density Score (SDS), a powerful measure to infer very recent changes in allele frequencies from contemporary genome sequences. When applied to data from the UK10K Project, SDS reflects allele frequency changes in the ancestors of modern Britons during the past 2,000 years. We see strong signals of selection at lactase and HLA, and in favor of blond hair and blue eyes. Turning to signals of polygenic adaptation we find, remarkably, that recent selection for increased height has driven allele frequency shifts across most of the genome. Moreover, we report suggestive new evidence for polygenic shifts affecting many other complex traits. Our results suggest that polygenic adaptation has played a pervasive role in shaping genotypic and phenotypic variation in modern humans. ER -